democracy

Closed Borders, Open Doors

Paris was ambushed by seven separate terrorist actions last night, a horrific set of events eerily reminiscent of both the Charlie Hebdo massacre less than a year ago and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Any one of them– the mass shootings in various restaurants and bars, the suicide bombing outside of a soccer match at the Stade de…

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Sixth Amendment, Unfunded

This is just a short post motivated by my #BlackLivesMatter Reading Group session yesterday, where we discussed Albert Samaha‘s excellent essay “Indefensible: The Story of New Orleans’ Public Defenders.”  I thought I was long past being shocked by anything

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The Wired Election, Part 3: “A Man Got To Have A Code.”

[This is the third installment of my series The Wired Election, employing insights gained from HBO television series The Wire to interpret 2016 Presidential election campaign events, persons and states of affair. The cheese stands alone.]

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My Sad Trombone Blows For The SCOTUS Decision (Which Also Blows)

Love did NOT win on Friday when the Supreme Court declared (so-called) “marriage equality” a Constitutional right in its Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Make no mistake: there were a lot of people/interests/agendas that did win yesterday, innumerably more that lost, but “love” wasn’t even a lowly grunt in that battle. Neither were “dignity,” “respect,” “tolerance,” “acceptance” and least of…

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Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

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Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

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Our Dirty War

The disappearance of citizens displays a perversely cruel and absolute sovereignty. —Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (2002) I should begin by noting that I started writing what follows last week, after the publication of the New York Times story on the “1.5 Million Missing Black Men in America” but before the popular uprising in Baltimore that began Monday as…

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Hashtagging Solidarity

The printing press, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane: each in their own way radically shrunk the world, diminished the power of mere distance to maintain our strangeness to one another.  Yet, arguably, no human innovation has served as a greater tool for transcending Nature’s most seemingly impregnable boundaries, space and time, than the World…

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The Academy Doesn’t Need a Civility Code. It Needs a Hostility Code.

Fair warning: what follows will assume the arguments I’ve already made against the advisability of “civility/collegiality” codes in academia here and here. Read those first.  Second fair warning:  there’s a lot to read herein before you get to my advocacy of a “hostility code.” Be patient, grasshoppers. My general blogging habit inclines me toward what…

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The Ferguson Lesson: Another Way To “Take Up Arms”

As someone who has spent the better part of her career researching, analyzing and teaching not only about the structure and nature of oppressive power regimes, but also better and worse ways to resist or transform such regimes, I’ve nevertheless been unable to settle in my own mind, to my own satisfaction, my position with…

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